How Wineport fits with your store, your taxes, and your stack.
Wineport is compliance software for wineries — from grape to glass. It started with direct-to-consumer (DTC) shipping compliance: following each destination state’s rules and paying its excise tax, the per-gallon tax a winery owes on the alcohol itself. It has since grown to cover the production side too — the federal TTB reports every bonded winery owes, your home state’s production returns, and the cellar records they’re built on. It sits alongside the store and licenses you already have — it doesn’t replace them or take a cut of your sales.
In practice, Wineport calculates your excise tax across all 51 U.S. jurisdictions and prepares filings for you to review and submit, prepares your federal and state production reports (Winemaker Reports), tracks filing deadlines and license renewals so nothing lapses, and keeps your permits and documents in one vault. Connect a Shopify store and it adds two compliance gates — one that blocks checkout for states you can’t ship to, and one that screens every order that comes through and holds anything risky for your review — plus an optional storefront age gate. Connect Commerce7 and orders sync automatically with an advisory compliance assessment on each. Not on either? You can still import your orders from a spreadsheet. Pricing is flat and monthly, with a free trial and no per-transaction fees.
Winemaker Reports are the production filings every bonded winery owes, prepared from your own records. Federal: the TTB Operations Report (F 5120.17), which reconciles wine in and out of bond — production, removals, losses, inventory — through a guided wizard with running balance checks, and the TTB Excise Tax Return (F 5000.24), which computes the tax on wine removed from bond at federal rates with the small-producer credit.
State: if your winery is in a state with its own production returns, those show up too — scoped automatically, so you only see the forms that apply to you. California wineries get the CDTFA Winegrower Return (501-WG) and the annual ABC Winegrowers/Blenders fee report, both prefilled from orders and production records. More states are on the way.
Each report tracks its deadline, prefills what Wineport can, includes how-to-file steps for its agency, and finishes on a print-ready worksheet. You review and submit with the agency — Wineport never files or pays on its own.
Labs is a growing set of production tools that capture cellar work as it happens, so your reports fill themselves. The centerpiece is Production & Removals — a two-sided cellar ledger for fermentation, sweetening, blending, bottling runs, losses, breakage, and taxpaid removals. Each entry is mapped to the TTB form line it feeds (a fermentation is line A2, a bottling run flows to A13/B2 with its loss to A29, and so on), and opening balances give you live bulk and bottled inventory on hand. A monthly email reminder helps the log keep pace with the cellar.
Labs also includes Dry Goods — bottles, corks, capsules, labels, and cases tracked alongside the wine they package — and Weigh Tags & Bills of Lading, captured where they happen and attached to your Document Vault. Labs features ship in beta first, shaped by feedback from working winemakers.
Sales tax and excise tax are two different things, and Wineport focuses on the second. Sales tax — the percentage collected from the customer at checkout — is typically handled by your storefront (for example, Shopify Tax or Avalara on Shopify).
Wineport handles the excise tax: the volume-based tax a winery owes the state on the alcohol itself, calculated per gallon. That’s the piece your storefront doesn’t cover, and it’s central to DTC compliance. In short, Wineport is the compliance layer that sits alongside your store, not a replacement for it.
Excise tax is volume-based, so Wineport converts your order quantities into gallons and applies the current state rate. Rates are verified against state agency sources, with a visible last-verified date, and updated as states change them.
The calculation is category- and volume-aware: tiered rates by wine type (still, sparkling, fortified — and where a state distinguishes, alcohol percentage) and true bottle volumes from 187ml cans to magnums, driven by the wine catalog you classify in Settings. Wines you haven’t classified fall back to sensible defaults (still, 750ml).
No — and that’s deliberate. Wineport prepares; you file. For destination-state excise, it calculates what you owe, generates a per-state report, and gives you the filing instructions — where to file, the portal link, and any state-specific notes. For Winemaker Reports, it goes further: guided wizards prefill the federal and state forms from your records, check that they balance, and hand you a print-ready worksheet to transcribe into the agency’s portal (Pay.gov for federal, the state portal for state returns).
In every case, you review the figures, submit the return, and pay the agency yourself — Wineport never files or pays on its own. It’s a compliance tool, not a licensed filing intermediary, and the final filing decision always stays with you.
All 50. Wineport tracks each state’s DTC status — allowed, restricted, or prohibited — along with permit requirements, volume limits, and carrier rules, and applies them in compliance checks. Excise rates are verified against agency sources for the large majority of states, with the rest based on published reference data and updated as we verify them.
Wineport starts with a 15-day free trial, no card required. After that, pricing is flat and monthly — with no per-transaction fees or percentage cut of your sales. The real-time Compliance Gate is included on every plan. See the pricing section on the home page for current tiers.
Yes. Wineport tracks the excise tax filing deadline for every state you ship to, based on each state’s filing frequency, and emails you before each one — 14 days out, 3 days out, and the day it’s due by default. You can adjust which reminders you get in Settings.
If a state requires a zero return even when you had no shipments, you can opt into reminders for those too. You can also add a second email address to loop in your accountant or bookkeeper. The same system sends license renewal reminders before each permit expires.
Wineport gates orders in two places. First, at checkout: a shopper trying to ship to a state you can’t serve is blocked before the order is ever placed — states where DTC is prohibited, or where you have no license on file, are blocked by default, and you can switch any state by hand. This runs inside Shopify’s own checkout and works on any Shopify plan.
Second, at fulfillment: every order that does come through is checked against state DTC rules in real time, and anything that fails — a state you can’t legally ship to, an international address, an expiring license — gets a hold placed on its fulfillment until you review it. You release or reject with one click, and every decision lands on a signed audit trail. The two layers mean a non-compliant order has to slip past both to reach a customer.
Wineport re-checks it for you. If an order was held only because a permit or license was missing, adding that license (or the permit state) prompts Wineport to re-evaluate your held and not-yet-shipped orders for that state — and the order that would now pass surfaces as ready for you to review and release.
It works the other way too: if a license expires, orders that already passed but haven’t shipped are flagged as no longer compliant, so nothing slips through. Wineport surfaces these for your review and never auto-ships or auto-cancels — releasing an order is always your call.
Yes. Wineport is approved and live on the Commerce7 App Store. Install it from Apps & Extensions in your Commerce7 admin, connect your Wineport account, and orders start syncing automatically — including a backfill of recent history so your tax reports have data on day one.
Once connected, every Ship order carries an advisory compliance assessment and its excise tax in a Wineport tab on the order, your Action Center is mirrored under the Store menu, and you can re-check an order in one click after renewing a license. The assessment is advisory: it informs your team’s review and never changes an order or affects fulfillment.
Yes. Wineport is listed on the Shopify App Store, and you can install it in one click. It connects to the store you already have — you keep your storefront and your license — and starts importing orders and checking each one against state DTC rules right away, with anything risky flagged in your Shopify admin.
You’ll find it at apps.shopify.com/wineport-dtc-compliance.
No. Shopify has the deepest integration — automatic order import plus live compliance holds at checkout and fulfillment. Commerce7 connects too: orders sync automatically, and each Ship order gets an advisory compliance assessment your team can review in the Commerce7 admin and in Wineport. The difference is by design — on Commerce7, Wineport advises and your team decides; it doesn’t change orders or affect fulfillment.
Not on either platform? You can still use Wineport by importing your orders from a CSV or Excel export, with smart column mapping that handles whatever format your system produces — so a winery on Square or QuickBooks can use everything except the live integrations.
The age gate comes with the Wineport Shopify app. Once Wineport is installed, open your Shopify admin and go to Online Store → Themes → Customize, then click the App embeds icon at the bottom of the left toolbar and toggle on “Wineport Age Gate.”
From there you can set the age, headline, logo, colors, button text, and how long a visitor is remembered — no code or theme edits required. Click Save and the gate goes live on your storefront, greeting visitors before they can shop and remembering who has already confirmed.
Yes. When a visitor confirms they’re of legal drinking age, Wineport records that attestation on their Shopify order. Wineport’s compliance check reads it and notes on the order that the customer attested to being 21 or older, and that entry shows up — cryptographically signed — in your audit log.
To be clear about what it is: an age gate is a customer attestation (they clicked to confirm), not verified ID. It’s recorded that way, and an adult signature is still required at delivery. You can turn attestation recording on or off in the age gate’s settings.
Yes — and Commerce7 is live. Wineport is on the Commerce7 App Store: install it, and orders sync automatically, each Ship order carries an advisory compliance assessment reviewable right in the Commerce7 admin, and your Action Center is mirrored there too. More integrations are planned — Corksy is next on the list.
We’re intentionally focused rather than trying to integrate with every POS at once. The goal is deep, reliable integrations with the platforms wineries actually use, not shallow connections to everything. If there’s a platform you depend on, tell us — it helps us prioritize.
Excise rates are verified against state agency sources and carry a visible last-verified date, and we update them as states change them. We take accuracy seriously because it’s the core of the product.
That said, Wineport is compliance software, not legal or tax advice. You remain responsible for your own filings, and we recommend verifying requirements with the relevant state agencies (or your compliance advisor) — the same way you would with any tax tool. Wineport is built to make that work faster and less error-prone, not to remove your responsibility for it.
Your data is isolated to your own account — other Wineport users cannot see your wineries, orders, or customers. We use industry-standard protections including encryption in transit and row-level security on our database, and platform access tokens are stored securely and used only to sync your data.
We do not sell personal information. Full details are in our privacy policy.
You can delete a winery or your entire account at any time from Settings, which removes the associated data. If you disconnect a connected store, Wineport stops syncing from it.
We also honor platform data-deletion requests — for example, Shopify’s shop-redaction webhook, which disconnects the store and removes synced personal data associated with it. You’re never locked in.
Wineport is designed to work alongside professional help, not replace your judgment. It handles the repetitive calculation, tracking, and deadline work, and gives you clear reports and filing instructions — which can reduce what you need to pay others to do manually.
For complex legal questions, license strategy, or situations unique to your business, your compliance attorney or advisor is still the right call. Think of Wineport as the tool that does the heavy lifting so the expert hours go where they matter.
Setup is quick: create an account, add your winery and the states you ship to, and either connect your store or import your orders. Most of the value — tax reports, deadline tracking, license reminders — is available right away.
If you’d rather see it first, we’re happy to walk you through a live demo. Email info@wineport.app and we’ll set one up.
Still have a question?
info@wineport.app